Weaponizing Anthropology. David H. Price
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reading from a dated script.
Moos explained to David Glenn how the War on Terror must sweep aside all reticence about bringing the CIA and other intelligence agencies onto our classrooms and into our hearts, arguing that:
The United States is at war, and thus, simply put, the existing cultural divide between the intelligence community, the U.S. military and academe has become a critical, dangerous, and very real detriment to our national security at home and abroad.
The former global symmetry of inter-nation conflict has become the asymmetry of terrorism and insurgency. Long gone are the days where academic anthropology might occasionally be applied to tourism and gender studies but not to critical area and language studies with a direct, practical use to national defense…..All of us have to re-examine our perceptions of each other, rather than simply claiming that the CIA in the United States, if not worldwide, now threatens the fundamental principles of academic transparency (Glenn 2005b).
President Bush’s declaration that the United States was at war with the concept of “terrorism” was vital to Moos, and something odd happened as he answered almost each of the queries from readers: Moos preferred answering questions with an odd formulaic montra stating, “ the United States is at war…” or “we are at war,” again and again with repeated answers. The effect was striking like a form of pastiche used by Stephen Colbert, as he would personalize this formula in all sorts of ways, such as when a question from a scholar from Yale was presented, he answered with the phrase, “The United States is at war, and that includes Yale and all American anthropologists…;” and when a scholar from U.C. Santa Barbara challenged him with a question, he began his reply stating “The United States is at war and that includes U.C. Santa Barbara.” Finally after nine separate uses of the chanting phrase, “we are at war,” one online participant wrote Moos: “You obviously enjoy typing the words, ‘we are at war.’ Do you think that typing the words, ‘we are at war’ gives you and the CIA license to ignore the past abuses of intelligence agencies? Who do you think ‘we’ are at war with anyway?” (Glenn 2005b).
Moos had no answer; all he could muster was a question in reply: “Are you serious?” Moos was certainly serious. In some ways, his was a more honest and forthright presentation of how academia would be expected to become subservient to the needs of state for intelligence gathering and analysis than the claims made by Montgomery McFate and other latter-day national security spokes-anthropologists.
In 1995 Moos testified before a commission modifying the AAA’s code on anthropological ethics that anthropologists should be allowed to engage in secretive research, arguing that, “In a world where weapons of mass destruction have become so terrible and terrorist actions so frightful, anthropologists must surrender naïve faith in a communitarian utopia and be prepared to encounter conflict and violence. Indeed they should feel the professional obligation to work in areas of ethnic conflict…moreover, as moral creatures so engaged, anthropologists should recognize the need to classify some of their data, if for no other reason than to protect the lives of their subjects and themselves” (Moos 1995). More recently, when the AAA reinstated ethical prohibitions against secret research in 2008, Moos remained in silence and did not even bother arguing his position with the Association.
It is PRISPs devotion to secrecy that is the root problem of its presence on our campuses as well as with Moos’ vision of anthropology harnessed for the needs of state. Moos’ fallacy is his belief that the fundamental problem with American intelligence agencies is that they are lacking adequate cultural understanding of those they study, and spy upon-this fallacy is exacerbated by orthodox assumptions that good intelligence operates best in realms of secrecy. America needs good intelligence, but the most useful and important intelligence can largely be gathered openly without the sort of covert invasion of our campuses that PRISP silently brings.
The claim that more open source, non-classified intelligence is what is needed is less far fetched than it might seem. In Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 historian Robin Winks recounts how in 1951, the CIA’s Sherwood Kent conducted an experiment in which a handful of Yale historians used nothing but declassified materials in Yale’s library to challenge CIA analysts (with access to classified data) to produce competing reports on U.S. military capacities, strengths and weaknesses focusing on a scale of detail down to the level of military divisions (Winks 1996:457-459). The written evaluation of this contest was known as the “Yale Report,” which concluded that over 90% of material in the CIA’s report was found in the Yale library. Kent further estimated that of the remaining 10% of “secret” materials, only half of this could be expected to remain secret for any length of time. President Truman was so furious with the results of the Yale Report that he suppressed its distribution, arguing that the press needed more restrictions governing the release of such sensitive materials, while Republican pundits joined the furor claiming that Yale liberals were trying to leak state secrets.
Evidence of the power of open intelligence is close at hand, consider only how American scholars’ (using publicly available sources) analysis of the dangers for post-invasion Iraq out-performed the CIA’s best estimates. As one who has lived in the Middle East and read Arabic news dailies online for years while watching the expansion of American policies that appear to misread the Arab world I suspect that a repeat of the Yale Report experiment focusing on the Middle East would find another 10% intelligence gap, but with the academy now winning due to the deleterious effects of generations of CIA intellectual inbreeding. Perhaps the Agency has become self-aware of these limits brought on by the internal reproduction of its own limited institutional culture, and in its own misshapen view it sees PRISP as a means of supplying itself with new blood to rejuvenate under cover provided by public classrooms. But such secrecy-based reforms are the products of a damaged institutional mind trying to repair itself.
Some might misread criticism of the CIA’s secret presence on our campuses as contradicting my critique of the need for more outside and dissenting input in intelligence circles, but such a reading would misunderstand the importance of openness in academic and political processes. The fundamental problems with American intelligence are exacerbated by secrecy-when intelligence agencies are allowed to classify and hide their assumptions, reports and analysis from public view they generate self-referential narrow visions that coalesce rather than challenge top-down policies from the administrations they serve. Intelligence agencies do need to understand the complex cultures they study, but to suggest that intelligence agencies like the CIA are simply amassing and interpreting political and cultural information is a dangerous fantasy: The CIA fulfills a tripartite role of gathering intelligence, interpreting intelligence, and working as a supraconstitutional covert arm of the presidency. It is this final role that should give scholars and citizens pause when considering how PRSIP and other university-intelligence-linked programs will use the knowledge they take from our open classrooms.
The CIA has made sure we won’t know which classrooms PRSIP scholars attend; this is rationalized as a requirement for protecting the identities of intelligence personnel. But this secrecy shapes PRISP as it takes on the form like a cell-based covert operation in which PRISP students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors, advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects (creating serious ethics problems under any post-Nuremberg professional ethics code or Institutional Review Board) knowing that they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence agencies.
In almost two decades of Freedom of Information Act research I have read too many FBI reports of students detailing the deviant political views of their professors (These range from the hilarious: As anthropologist Norman Humphrey was reported to have called President Eisenhower a “duckbilled nincompoop”; to the Dadaist: wherein former Miss America, Marilyn van Derbur, reported that sociologist Howard Higman mocked J. Edgar Hoover in class; to the chilling: as when the FBI arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of “informal” conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the focus an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy) to not mention the likelihood that these PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their professors and fellow students (Higman 1998; Price 2004). I would be remiss to not mention that students are not the only ones sneaking the CIA onto our campuses. There are also unknown thousands of university professors